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"While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it, while there is a soul in prison I am not free."Thu, 26 Feb 2015 14:14:27 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/http://0.gravatar.com/blavatar/0717b7b792308e121dc08f8406fa30db?s=96&d=http%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.pngPrison Books Collectivehttp://prisonbooks.info
2 Former Mississippi Officials Plead Guilty in a Graft Case Involving Private Prisonshttp://prisonbooks.info/2015/02/26/2-former-mississippi-officials-plead-guilty-in-a-graft-case-involving-private-prisons/
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Christopher B. Epps, the former head of Mississippi’s prison system, in Jackson on Wednesday.

Two former Mississippi officials, including the head of the prison system, pleaded guilty to corruption charges on Wednesday amid a federal inquiry that rattled the state’s government and raised new questions about its use of private prisons.

The guilty pleas, entered in Federal District Court in Jackson, came nearly four months after the authorities announced a 49-count indictment that named Christopher B. Epps, the former commissioner of the Department of Corrections, and Cecil McCrory, a onetime state lawmaker who had become involved with the private prisons industry.

In the indictment, which formed the basis of Wednesday’s pleas, federal prosecutors accused the men of a scheme in which Mr. McCrory directed more than $1 million to Mr. Epps, including cash and mortgage payments, in exchange for lucrative state contracts.

Judge Henry T. Wingate scheduled sentencing hearings for June, and a lawyer for Mr. Epps, John M. Colette, said he expected him to be sent to prison.

“He worked his whole life to attain the pinnacle of his career in corrections, and now he’s facing a jail sentence,” Mr. Colette said in a telephone interview. “It was not a good day for anybody.”

Mr. Colette said that Mr. Epps was cooperating with federal investigators, and that “there are others involved allegedly who have not been charged just yet.”

Mr. McCrory’s lawyer did not respond to a message seeking comment.

The United States attorney’s office had no comment beyond an announcement of the guilty pleas, but Gov. Phil Bryant said in a statement that Mr. Epps’s downfall “serves as an example that there are consequences for public corruption.”

Mississippi officials opened a review of state contracts after Mr. Epps’s indictment, and Mr. Bryant on Wednesday called for “meaningful reform to the state contracting process.”

During his 12 years as corrections commissioner, Mr. Epps was praised by some as a positive force in Jackson. But he was also criticized for poor conditions in the state’s prisons, as well as for Mississippi’s reliance on the private facilities that were ultimately connected to his own criminal conduct.

Despite his critics, Mr. Epps was well respected in Mississippi, where he cultivated a prominent profile built in part on his 20-year rise from prison guard to corrections chief. But by Wednesday morning in Judge Wingate’s courtroom, The Clarion-Ledger reported, Mr. Epps was reduced to offering an apology.

“I’m sorry for what I’ve done,” Mr. Epps said. “I’ve repented before God. I apologize to my family and the State of Mississippi.”

]]>http://prisonbooks.info/2015/02/26/2-former-mississippi-officials-plead-guilty-in-a-graft-case-involving-private-prisons/feed/0prisonbookscollectiveChristopher B. Epps, the former head of Mississippi’s prison system, in Jackson on Wednesday.Sean Swain and Retaliatory Transfer to Ohio’s Most Notorious Prisonhttp://prisonbooks.info/2015/02/24/sean-swain-and-retaliatory-transfer-to-ohios-most-notorious-prison/
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“I’ve been wearing the same pair of underwear since Tuesday. That night at three in the morning the warden at the super duper max, Jay “Lowdown” Forshay informed me that I was being transferred to Lucasville. Lucasville, home of the 1993 prisoner uprising, is a psychological September Eleventh for the Ohio prison system. It’s also the prison where ODRC officials attempted to put former prisoner writer Timothy “Little Rock” Reed in order to engineer his death until he gained asylum from Ohio in New Mexico, proving conclusively that Ohio prison officials attempted to murder him.

In the lead up to this transfer prison officials tried several times unsuccessfully to silence me. Blocking phone communication for eight weeks to keep me off the radio, intercepting intercepting postings for SeanSwain.org and communications with counsel who filed a civil action against prison officials on my behalf, and then blocking my video visits to stop me from generating video on the site, which is illegal, not that the laws matter to fascists.

In response I undertook a hunger strike until I was threatened with being tossed in the hole, which is illegal, not that laws matter to fascists. So I began a med strike, and then OSP physician James Kline held me incommunicado with medical isolation, in a torture cell, until I agreed to take blood pressure medication I had refused, which is illegal, not that they care.

So, before I could even finish writing the epic tale of those wacky shenanigans, I was told to hop on a prison bus for Lucasville. When I protested that this was selective, Jay Lowdown said, “we thought you’d say that, that’s why thirty seven others are going with you. So, to disguise prison fascist’s targeting of me, they tossed thirty seven other dolphins into the tuna net as collateral damage.

The bus ride was unannounced, totally irregular, and it happened only hours after the phone call about an injunction that I had with counsel, which prison officials certainly didn’t monitor… yeah, right. The bus wasn’t gassed up. When it stopped at another prison to get gassed up, our bag lunches weren’t prepared. All indications that this happened spur of the moment.

When we rolled away from OSP, our property, packed in boxes on the pavement was still sitting there. It wouldn’t fit in the underside of the bus. Again, a total absence of planning. But the ODRC isn’t out to get me and this had nothing to do with responding repressively to anticipated legal moves by my attorney. Stop laughing.

Lucasville. The place stinks with malice, as though it’s very existence day to day is a personal revenge mission carried out against it’s captives. Built in the early seventies, it looks like a bad prison movie. The cells are roughly a quarter the size of my cell at OSP, big enough for a steel toilet, steel sink, steel bed and a steel desktop, and heated by a rusty steal radiator along the back wall, covered in forty years of colorful funk: encrusted food and unidentifiable stuff.

None of the windows close anymore. Mine has a beautiful view of the gun tower. Forty cells, two tiers of twenty on each side, facing forty cells on the other side. The cell fronts are made of bars from the waist up, painted baby poop green. There’s no privacy, but it’s like living in a community. It reminds me of tenement buildings, where poor folks built relationships across fire escapes. It’s like that.

The thirty eight as we transfers were dubbed by staff, didn’t even have hygiene given to us until Thursday. On Friday, everybody but me got changes of clothes and towels to get them through the weekend. Me, I’m still wearing the same underwear since Tuesday and there’s no telling when I’ll get my property, or if I’ll get it. I suspect this was done to make me suffer.

When I spoke to the major, DA Warren, he was sympathetic until he saw my name on the door. Then he said “oh, you’re Swain” and his demeanor changed. Clearly, the administration here has already been brainwashed to see me as an enemy and to repress accordingly. But interestingly, their selective deprivations have provoked something amazing. Other prisoners who do not even know me from a can of gray paint saw my situation. They don’t know why officials hate me, and they’ve never even heard this broadcast. First came a donation of a paper and pen, then a styrofoam cup and enough coffee to get me through the weekend. Then food: Ramen noodles, which are gold on the black market, and cheese sandwiches, along with a long john shirt, which has been a lifesaver. With just the clothes on my back and standard issue bedding, I’ve been sleeping on the floor with my mattress pressed against the raditor. Last: a pair of shoes.

Nobody asked for anything in return and told me to return what I could, when I could, if I could. One guy yelled across the range that he knew what it felt like to have nothing. Not to worry. Inspiring that in the darkest, most hideous hate factory the worst offenders show so much sympathy while the staff don’t.

I think it was Menken, maybe Lardner who said if you want to see the worst that humanity has to offer, come to a max security prison at shift change.

Welcome to Lucasville.

This is anarchist prisoner Sean Swain from the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville. If you’re listening, you are the resistance.”

He likely won’t get any mail that was sent to OSP in the last week or two.

SUPPORT SEAN:

We know Lucasville is a particularly lawless and messed up prison. We don’t expect the warden or staff there to conduct themselves at all professionally or to care the least about our demands. So, we’re asking supporters to go over their heads and contact the South East regional director, Rob Jeffreys at 614-752-1104. If you’re feeling salty you can also remind Jefferies that he’s already a defendant in Sean’s civil suit for participating in the repressive shenanigans against Sean at ManCI.
Email: Rob.Jeffreys@odrc.state.oh.us
Mail: Rob Jeffreys, SE Regional Director, 770 West Broad Street, Columbus, Ohio 43222
CALL IN SCRIPT:

“Hello, My name is ____. I am calling with concerns about SOCF targeting and harassing a prisoner named Sean Swain, inmate number 243-205. I’m requesting that your office increase oversight of this prison and make sure staff at SOCF promptly return all of Sean’s property without damage and that Sean not be subject to further singling out, harassment, restrictions of access to communication or any other privileges to which he is entitled. Thank you.”

If you feel like calling more people, you can also contact SOCF Warden Donald Morgan.

‘They were held incommunicado for much longer than I think should be permitted in this country – anywhere – but particularly given the strong constitutional rights afforded to people who are being charged with crimes,” said Sarah Gelsomino, the lawyer for Brian Jacob Church.

The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.

The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights.

Holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as young as 15.

At least one man was found unresponsive in a Homan Square “interview room” and later pronounced dead.

Brian Jacob Church, a protester known as one of the “Nato Three”, was held and questioned at Homan Square in 2012 following a police raid. Officers restrained Church for the better part of a day, denying him access to an attorney, before sending him to a nearby police station to be booked and charged.

“Homan Square is definitely an unusual place,” Church told the Guardian on Friday. “It brings to mind the interrogation facilities they use in the Middle East. The CIA calls them black sites. It’s a domestic black site. When you go in, no one knows what’s happened to you.”

The secretive warehouse is the latest example of Chicago police practices that echo the much-criticized detention abuses of the US war on terrorism. While those abuses impacted people overseas, Homan Square – said to house military-style vehicles, interrogation cells and even a cage – trains its focus on Americans, most often poor, black and brown.

Unlike a precinct, no one taken to Homan Square is said to be booked. Witnesses, suspects or other Chicagoans who end up inside do not appear to have a public, searchable record entered into a database indicating where they are, as happens when someone is booked at a precinct. Lawyers and relatives insist there is no way of finding their whereabouts. Those lawyers who have attempted to gain access to Homan Square are most often turned away, even as their clients remain in custody inside.

“It’s sort of an open secret among attorneys that regularly make police station visits, this place – if you can’t find a client in the system, odds are they’re there,” said Chicago lawyer Julia Bartmes.

Chicago civil-rights attorney Flint Taylor said Homan Square represented a routinization of a notorious practice in local police work that violates the fifth and sixth amendments of the constitution.

“This Homan Square revelation seems to me to be an institutionalization of the practice that dates back more than 40 years,” Taylor said, “of violating a suspect or witness’ rights to a lawyer and not to be physically or otherwise coerced into giving a statement.”

Much remains hidden about Homan Square. The Chicago police department has not responded to any of the Guardian’s recent questions – neither about any aspect of operations at Homan Square, nor about the Guardian’s investigation of Richard Zuley, the retired Chicago detective turned Guantánamo Bay torturer. (On Monday evening, it instead provided a statement to MSNBC regarding the Guardian’s Zuley investigation: “The vast majority of our officers serve the public with honor and integrity,” said the statement, adding that the department “has zero tolerance for misconduct, and has instituted a series of internal initiatives and reforms, to ensure past incidents of police misconduct are not repeated”. Without providing any specifics, it claimed “the allegations in this instance are not supported by the facts.”)

When a Guardian reporter arrived at the warehouse on Friday, a man at the gatehouse outside refused any entrance and would not answer questions. “This is a secure facility. You’re not even supposed to be standing here,” said the man, who refused to give his name.

A former Chicago police superintendent and a more recently retired detective, both of whom have been inside Homan Square in the last few years in a post-police capacity, said the police department did not operate out of the warehouse until the late 1990s.

But in detailing episodes involving their clients over the past several years, lawyers described mad scrambles that led to the closed doors of Homan Square, a place most had never heard of previously. The facility was even unknown to Rob Warden, the founder of Northwestern University Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, until the Guardian informed him of the allegations of clients who vanish into inherently coercive police custody.

“They just disappear,” said Anthony Hill, a criminal defense attorney, “until they show up at a district for charging or are just released back out on the street.”

‘The real danger in allowing practices like Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib is the fact that they always creep into other aspects,’ criminologist Tracy Siska told the Guardian.

‘Never going to see the light of day’: the search for the Nato Three, the head wound, the worried mom and the dead man

Jacob Church learned about Homan Square the hard way. On May 16 2012, he and 11 others were taken there after police infiltrated their protest against the Nato summit. Church says officers cuffed him to a bench for an estimated 17 hours, intermittently interrogating him without reading his Miranda rights to remain silent. It would take another three hours – and an unusual lawyer visit through a wire cage – before he was finally charged with terrorism-related offenses at the nearby 11th district station, where he was made to sign papers, fingerprinted and photographed.

In preparation for the Nato protest, Church, who is from Florida, had written a phone number for the National Lawyers Guild on his arm as a precautionary measure. Once taken to Homan Square, Church asked explicitly to call his lawyers, and said he was denied.

“Essentially, I wasn’t allowed to make any contact with anybody,” Church told the Guardian, in contradiction of a police guidance on permitting phone calls and legal counsel to arrestees.

Church’s left wrist was cuffed to a bar behind a bench in windowless cinderblock cell, with his ankles cuffed together. He remained in those restraints for about 17 hours.

“I had essentially figured, ‘All right, well, they disappeared us and so we’re probably never going to see the light of day again,’” Church said.

Though the raid attracted major media attention, a team of attorneys could not find Church through 12 hours of “active searching”, Sarah Gelsomino, Church’s lawyer, recalled. No booking record existed. Only after she and others made a “major stink” with contacts in the offices of the corporation counsel and Mayor Rahm Emanuel did they even learn about Homan Square.

They sent another attorney to the facility, where he ultimately gained entry, and talked to Church through a floor-to-ceiling chain-link metal cage. Finally, hours later, police took Church and his two co-defendants to a nearby police station for booking.

After serving two and a half years in prison, Church is currently on parole after he and his co-defendants were found not guilty in 2014 of terrorism-related offenses but guilty of lesser charges of possessing an incendiary device and the misdemeanor of “mob action”.

The access that Nato Three attorneys received to Homan Square was an exception to the rule, even if Jacob Church’s experience there was not.

Three attorneys interviewed by the Guardian report being personally turned away from Homan Square between 2009 and 2013 without being allowed access to their clients. Two more lawyers who hadn’t been physically denied described it as a place where police withheld information about their clients’ whereabouts. Church was the only person who had been detained at the facility who agreed to talk with the Guardian: their lawyers say others fear police retaliation.

One man in January 2013 had his name changed in the Chicago central bookings database and then taken to Homan Square without a record of his transfer being kept, according to Eliza Solowiej of Chicago’s First Defense Legal Aid. (The man, the Guardian understands, wishes to be anonymous; his current attorney declined to confirm Solowiej’s account.) She found out where he was after he was taken to the hospital with a head injury.

“He said that the officers caused his head injuries in an interrogation room at Homan Square. I had been looking for him for six to eight hours, and every department member I talked to said they had never heard of him,” Solowiej said. “He sent me a phone pic of his head injuries because I had seen him in a police station right before he was transferred to Homan Square without any.”

Bartmes, another Chicago attorney, said that in September 2013 she got a call from a mother worried that her 15-year-old son had been picked up by police before dawn. A sympathetic sergeant followed up with the mother to say her son was being questioned at Homan Square in connection to a shooting and would be released soon. When hours passed, Bartmes traveled to Homan Square, only to be refused entry for nearly an hour.

An officer told her, “Well, you can’t just stand here taking notes, this is a secure facility, there are undercover officers, and you’re making people very nervous,” Bartmes recalled. Told to leave, she said she would return in an hour if the boy was not released. He was home, and not charged, after “12, maybe 13” hours in custody.

On February 2, 2013, John Hubbard was taken to Homan Square. Hubbard never walked out. The Chicago Tribune reported that the 44-year old was found “unresponsive inside an interview room”, and pronounced dead. The Cook County medical examiner’s office could not locate any record for the Guardian indicating a cause of Hubbard’s death. It remains unclear why Hubbard was ever in police custody.

Homan Square is hardly concerned exclusively with terrorism. Several special units operate outside of it, including the anti-gang and anti-drug forces. If police “want money, guns, drugs”, or information on the flow of any of them onto Chicago’s streets, “they bring them there and use it as a place of interrogation off the books,” Hill said.

‘That scares the hell out of me’: a throwback to Chicago police abuse with a post-9/11 feel

A former Chicago detective and current private investigator, Bill Dorsch, said he had not heard of the police abuses described by Church and lawyers for other suspects who had been taken to Homan Square. He has been permitted access to the facility to visit one of its main features, an evidence locker for the police department. (“I just showed my retirement star and passed through,” Dorsch said.)

Transferring detainees through police custody to deny them access to legal counsel, would be “a career-ender,” Dorsch said. “To move just for the purpose of hiding them, I can’t see that happening,” he told the Guardian.

Richard Brzeczek, Chicago’s police superintendent from 1980 to 1983, who also said he had no first-hand knowledge of abuses at Homan Square, said it was “never justified” to deny access to attorneys.

“Homan Square should be on the same list as every other facility where you can call central booking and say: ‘Can you tell me if this person is in custody and where,’” Brzeczek said.

“If you’re going to be doing this, then you have to include Homan Square on the list of facilities that prisoners are taken into and a record made. It can’t be an exempt facility.”

Indeed, Chicago police guidelines appear to ban the sorts of practices Church and the lawyers said occur at Homan Square.

A directive titled “Processing Persons Under Department Control” instructs that “investigation or interrogation of an arrestee will not delay the booking process,” and arrestees must be allowed “a reasonable number of telephone calls” to attorneys swiftly “after their arrival at the first place of custody.” Another directive, “Arrestee and In-Custody Communications,” says police supervisors must “allow visitation by attorneys.”

Attorney Scott Finger said that the Chicago police tightened the latter directive in 2012 after quiet complaints from lawyers about their lack of access to Homan Square. Without those changes, Church’s attorneys might not have gained entry at all. But that tightening – about a week before Church’s arrest – did not prevent Church’s prolonged detention without a lawyer, nor the later cases where lawyers were unable to enter.

The combination of holding clients for long periods, while concealing their whereabouts and denying access to a lawyer, struck legal experts as a throwback to the worst excesses of Chicago police abuse, with a post-9/11 feel to it.

On a smaller scale, Homan Square is “analogous to the CIA’s black sites,” said Andrea Lyon, a former Chicago public defender and current dean of Valparaiso University Law School. When she practiced law in Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s, she said, “police used the term ‘shadow site’” to refer to the quasi-disappearances now in place at Homan Square.

“Back when I first started working on torture cases and started representing criminal defendants in the early 1970s, my clients often told me they’d been taken from one police station to another before ending up at Area 2 where they were tortured,” said Taylor, the civil-rights lawyer most associated with pursuing the notoriously abusive Area 2 police commander Jon Burge. “And in that way the police prevent their family and lawyers from seeing them until they could coerce, through torture or other means, confessions from them.”

Police often have off-site facilities to have private conversations with their informants. But a retired Washington DC homicide detective, James Trainum, could not think of another circumstance nationwide where police held people incommunicado for extended periods.

“I’ve never known any kind of organized, secret place where they go and just hold somebody before booking for hours and hours and hours. That scares the hell out of me that that even exists or might exist,” said Trainum, who now studies national policing issues, to include interrogations, for the Innocence Project and the Constitution Project.

Regardless of departmental regulations, police frequently deny or elide access to lawyers even at regular police precincts, said Solowiej of First Defense Legal Aid. But she said the outright denial was exacerbated at Chicago’s secretive interrogation and holding facility: “It’s very, very rare for anyone to experience their constitutional rights in Chicago police custody, and even more so at Homan Square,” Solowiej said.

Church said that one of his more striking memories of Homan Square was the “big, big vehicles” police had inside the complex that “look like very large MRAPs that they use in the Middle East.”

Cook County, home of Chicago, has received some 1,700 pieces of military equipment from a much-criticized Pentagon program transferring military gear to local police. It includes a Humvee, according to a local ABC News report.

“The real danger in allowing practices like Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib is the fact that they always creep into other aspects,” Siska said.

“They creep into domestic law enforcement, either with weaponry like with the militarization of police, or interrogation practices. That’s how we ended up with a black site in Chicago.”

]]>http://prisonbooks.info/2015/02/24/the-disappeared-chicago-police-detain-americans-at-abuse-laden-black-site/feed/0prisonbookscollective ‘They were held incommunicado for much longer than I think should be permitted in this country – anywhere – but particularly given the strong constitutional rights afforded to people who are being charged with crimes,” said Sarah Gelsomino, the lawyer for Brian Jacob Church. ‘The real danger in allowing practices like Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib is the fact that they always creep into other aspects,’ criminologist Tracy Siska told the Guardian. Saturday, 3/14: Benefit Book Sale! Over a Thousand Bookshttp://prisonbooks.info/2015/02/24/saturday-314-benefit-book-sale-over-a-thousand-books/
http://prisonbooks.info/2015/02/24/saturday-314-benefit-book-sale-over-a-thousand-books/#commentsTue, 24 Feb 2015 18:53:32 +0000http://prisonbooks.info/?p=5864]]>USED BOOK SALE: Saturday, March 14th, the Prison Books Collective is hosting a one day book sale starting at 9am. We have hundreds and hundreds of great books that we can’t send into prisons, but that we can send home with you. Many left political titles, text books, history, literature, military manuals ,contemporary fiction, and art. This sale is a benefit to raise funds for our enormous postage costs.

This giant book sale is a great way to get some wonderful books and support the work of the Prison Books Collective.

Dissatisfied tenants staged protests during the weekend at apartment complexes across Carrboro to challenge abnormally high water bills.

More than 30 community members and residents of General Services Corporation (GSC) properties gathered Saturday to confront what several called predatory water bill pricing. They hand-delivered letters of protest to five GSC properties, including Ridgewood, Royal Park, University Lake, Carolina Apartments and Estes Park.

“We are here to send a message to GSC management — we’re here to ask them to do the right thing,” said Rev. Nathan Hollister, who is responsible for spearheading the community’s response to GSC’s business practices.

The letter asked GSC management to meet with Hollister and other leaders, replace the third party Florida-based water monitoring company with the Orange Water and Sewer Authority, a local utilities company, and provide a point of contact for future tenant grievances.

Tenants gave GSC one week to respond to demands, promising future action if the letter is ignored.

Carrboro resident Madison Hayes said the struggle against GSC began two years ago when the company announced it would no longer accept Section 8 housing vouchers, which provide rent assistance for underprivileged families.

“We saw a mass exodus of mostly low-income families from the Chapel Hill-Carrboro area, a lot of whom received an eviction notice and were told that they had to vacate their home within 30 days,” Hayes said. “There’s no other affordable housing in the area, so families had to quit jobs, find transportation, pack up their homes, uproot their kids from school and ship off to find someplace else to live.”

A grassroots approach was the tenants’ only option, Hayes said.

“We’ve been in communication with the town, but there hasn’t been anything they’ve been able to do, and there is no other entity in place that can respond to the predatory actions that this company has been taking on low-income families in the area,” she said.

A history of protests

General Services Corporation stopped accepting the Section 8 vouchers from residents in 2013.

In October, Hollister brought a petition before the Carrboro Board of Aldermen with more than 100 signatures from residents protesting the water bill rates. It also addressed GSC’s use of an out-of-state utilities company.

Monitoring usage from Florida hampers communication about bills between the company, GSC and tenants, and is especially tough to navigate for those who speak English as a second language, Hollister said.

Inexplicably expensive

GSC’s Estes Park property is home to many refugees from Myanmar, many of whom only speak broken English, Hollister said. About 10 of the refugees were present to protest the high water bills.

Other residents, such as Judy Callahan, a tenant of Carolina Apartments, also turned out for the protest to challenge the steadily increasing and inexplicably high water bills.

Callahan said she consistently receives water bills of more than $60, though she does not own a washing machine and uses her dishwasher only twice weekly. The highest bill she received totaled more than $190 — when she complained, she was told that it was her responsibility to call and sort it out.

“I said, ‘Call who? I don’t even know who you are!’” she said.

Marc Bennett, a resident of the Chapel Hill apartment complex Kingswood, another GSC property, described the billing practices as arbitrary.

“I suspect that they are aggregating, meaning that they are looking at usage and dividing by the number of residents,” he said.

“It’s not, ‘How much water am I using?’ — that’s not what’s reflected on my bill.”

Bennett also described his most recent run-in with GSC management. For the past six months, his sinks have backed up with sewage water. After GSC repeatedly ignored his complaints, he called the town.

“Once Kingswood found out that I alerted the city, they ran out here,” he said. “They know they’re wrong, but this has been going on a long time.”

Last week I was part of Queering Abolition, a panel discussion on queer and trans prison advocacy and abolition. One of my co-panelists was Susan Rosenberg, a former political prisoner who spent 16 years in prison before her sentence was commuted by outgoing President Bill Clinton. The panel was in the auditorium of the City University of New York Graduate Center. Being on the panel was exciting — not just because I was part of a dialogue around prison advocacy and abolition that centered on trans people, but also because it reminded me of how far I’d come and how much community and movement support have enabled me.

I first saw Susan Rosenberg in that same auditorium about 12 years ago. She had been released from prison the year before and was part of a day-long conference on incarceration. My daughter was not quite two years old and, like many political events — both then and now — there was no child care. The organizers told me that I was welcome to bring my child and so I did.

She had a fantastic time. My daughter, after nursing for a bit and sitting in my lap for an even shorter bit, wriggled out of my arms and explored the back rows of the auditorium. The seats were like those in the movie theater, springing up when no weight was applied. She was entranced with these seats, pulling them down and letting them flip back up with a clatter. She did this again and again, much to the amusement of the handful of 20-somethings around us. I kept one eye on her and one eye on the stage where, far below, Susan Rosenberg, Laura Whitehorn and two other important people in the prison movement talked about women and incarceration.

When the audience erupted into applause, my daughter stopped and applauded along. “Yaaaay!” she cheered, as she clapped her tiny hands together over and over.

Partway through the next panel, she grew bored with the back row and began making her way down the aisle. I let her get about 10 feet away from me before grabbing her and carrying her back. She did this several times, growing more and more confident navigating the shallow slope. Then, she began to run towards the stage and the stairs leading to the stage, steps that are oh-so-alluring in the eyes of a not-quite two-year-old. By then, only a sliver of my attention was on the discussion on-stage; most of it was on my daughter and trying to keep her from disrupting the conference. So, we left.

Twelve years later, I was back in that same room — not as a harried and under-supported parent this time, but as a panelist. Unlike the last time, as I set foot in the auditorium, the organizers of Queering Abolition (Black and Pink — NYC, which supports queer and trans people inside prisons) offered child care. And it also made me think about all the ways, between those two events and those 12 years, that people in various movements and communities stepped up to support me as a mother in their midst, enabling me to learn, grow and continue to be part of social justice organizing. Without their support, I might have kept on being the person who left discussions and events until I grew tired of even trying.

But I’m lucky. There are so many people who have recently become parents or primary caregivers who don’t have that kind of support — or people in their lives who understand the need for support and are willing to help meet that need. We parents know that we need support if we’re going to continue being part of political organizing, but it’s overwhelming and exhausting to continually ask our supposed comrades if they can accommodate our new needs. It’s even more overwhelming and exhausting when the answer is no.

In 2003, I met China Martens, a mother in Baltimore who would become my co-conspirator for what we called the “all-ages child care revolution.” What we realized, early on, is that, rather than trying to get parents to take on the additional responsibility of building their support networks, it’s much more effective to talk to people who do not have caregiving responsibilities and make them understand the importance of supporting parents and caregivers’ participation. People without children (or other caregiving responsibilities) have more time to help out, to plan support strategies and to advocate for family-friendly movement spaces and events. It shouldn’t always fall on those most directly affected (and exhausted) to have to create these spaces on their own. That’s a pretty sure way to push them away from organizing work.

Here are some ways that helped and can easily be applied to your own organizing work. They don’t require a huge amount of resources, but do demonstrate a commitment to creating movements that accommodate all ages.

1. Provide child care

Child care doesn’t need to be elaborate. It does need to be in a room that is clean and safe, meaning that there are no hazards for a small child. Ideally two (or more) people should be doing child care so that, if an emergency arises, no children are left alone.

Child care does require a commitment from the organizers that it is a priority and should not be left until the last minute. It should also be clearly announced on all outreach and publicity. Otherwise, parents assume that there is no child care and will stay home.

2. If you don’t have a rapport with kids, find other ways to help

Be the one to come in early, clean the room and make sure there are no choking hazards, exposed electrical outlets, plastic bags or sharp objects. Crawl on the floor and look at the room as if you were a baby. What do you see there that might be dangerous? Not sure what constitutes a choking hazard? If it seems like it would fit through a toilet paper tube, get it out of there!

Offer to be the one on call if an emergency arises and ferry information to the appropriate person. If a child suddenly misses their caregiver or doesn’t feel well, be the person to locate the caregiver and make sure they get to the room quickly.

3. Have food

The organizers of Queering Abolition served dinner (a vegan and gluten-free dinner at that), and made sure to announce that fact on all of their publicity.

For parents, having food at an evening meeting or event may be the deciding factor as to whether they attend or whether they hustle their child(ren) home after school and fix them supper. (Even people without children will appreciate not having to choose between eating dinner and attending a meeting or event.)

4. Be prepared to have children in the room

This might sound like it contradicts the first point, but it doesn’t. Even when you provide child care, some children don’t want to be so far from their caregivers (and vice versa). Be prepared to have children in the meeting or event space. If you’re the facilitator or a speaker, make an announcement about children’s presence beforehand so that parents don’t feel obliged to leave the room once their child(ren) start making noise. When he notices children in the room, Jason Lydon of Black and Pink Boston announces, “Children’s noise is the sound of our movement growing.” I’ve taken to saying that too and, when I do, I’ve noticed that not only do parents visibly relax, but others in the room don’t give them the side-eye.

Have toys and activities for kids to do. When my daughter turned two, a fellow volunteer at ABC No Rio, a community arts center, bought her a bag of wooden blocks, which we kept there. We also kept a basket of toys for her so that whenever she came with me or her dad, she would have a variety of things to do. Similarly, the office of Women on the Rise telling HerStory, or WORTH, an advocacy organization of formerly incarcerated women, had a crib, children’s books and toys.

5. Be the person who gets down on the floor and plays with the kid in the room

Children, particularly young children, don’t like being left to play by themselves, even if they are in the middle of the room. Be the person who gets down on the floor to color with them or build a fabulous structure out of blocks. You can still keep an ear on the discussion — trust me, I know from years of experience — while also allowing the parent or caregiver to participate more fully.

This also applies to spaces where organizing grows: At WORTH, when a staff member had a baby, she brought him to the office regularly and everyone took responsibility for him. They held him so that she could have two hands free to meet her responsibilities. They fed him when he was hungry. They changed his diaper. And, when he began to toddle around, they followed him and made sure he didn’t hurt himself or wreak too much havoc on the office.

Supporting the all-ages revolution doesn’t end when the meeting or event comes to a close. You can incorporate these into your everyday life — and make a new friend in the process!

6. Doing something that a child might enjoy? Invite that kid along!

Do you have a plot in a garden? Do you love to skateboard or bike? Do you bake cookies, make giant puppets or quilt? Invite a kid to join you. It may be slow-going at first to teach a three-year-old how to safely wield a needle or not to rub glue or paint in their hair, but they learn quickly. In the meantime, you’re giving them an opportunity to experience something new while also giving their caregiver a probably much-needed break.

7. Start to develop relationships with caregivers and children in your movements and communities

It can start with inviting them over to have dinner (or lunch or brunch). Get to know them — and let them get to know you. Asking for help from people who are virtually strangers can be difficult but, as they grow to know you better, caregivers and kids will feel easier letting you know what they need, as well as what doesn’t work for them. And you’ll get to know them and figure out ways that you and those around you can accommodate their needs so that they can stay involved.

This is far from an exhaustive list. There are many different ways to help build an all-ages revolution. My co-conspirator China and I put together “Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind,” originally as a zine series and, two years ago, as an edited anthology, to include the many different ways that caregivers, kids and others in their community have worked to create all-ages movements.

]]>http://prisonbooks.info/2015/02/23/seven-ways-to-revolutionize-childcare-and-build-all-ages-movements/feed/0prisonbookscollectiveChildcare at the 2009 City from Below conference in Baltimore.Alternatives to Incarceration: Be Careful What You Wish Forhttp://prisonbooks.info/2015/02/20/alternatives-to-incarceration-be-careful-what-you-wish-for/
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The term “alternatives to incarceration” takes for granted that we are talking about ways to handle criminals who otherwise would need to be incarcerated — that incarceration is a reasonable baseline against which to measure “alternatives.” In light of the over-representation of Americans of color and low-income Americans in jails and prisons, however, it’s necessary to be careful about any sort of presumption of correlation between criminality and incarceration. In fact, about a third of people locked up in the US are awaiting trial; that is, they have not been convicted of a crime. Another third are locked up because they violated the terms of probation or parole; that is; the “criminal” act was not sufficiently egregious to require imprisonment but a subsequent action – often simply not showing up for a meeting with a parole or probation officer, or failing to keep up restitution payments or money owed in court fees – was the reason for incarceration. And 97% of federal and state criminal prosecutions are resolved by plea bargain – often accepted by defendants out of fear that if they don’t accept the deal they will be locked up even longer — rather than by trial.

Given these numbers, it’s easier to make a case for abolition than for “alternatives to incarceration.” But that is not the direction in which public discourse seems to be moving. To the contrary, the increasingly popular sentiment goes something like this: A whole lot of people sitting in jails and prisons are mentally ill; they are drug users who need treatment more than they need punishment. Echoing this sentiment, Los Angeles County – the US county with the largest number of incarcerated people – recently approved a $1.9 billion proposal to tear down Men’s Central Jail and construct a 4,885-bed “Consolidated Correctional Treatment Facility”. And while “treatment” certainly sounds beneficial, the content of that treatment has yet to be spelled out.

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Over the past five years I followed a cohort of Massachusetts women who cycle in and out of prison as well as a variety of treatment programs. All of the women, at some point in their lives, have been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder (most commonly substance abuse, bipolar disorder, PTSD). Overall, these twenty-six women spent far more time in treatment than in correctional settings. Yet, at the end of five years only three women had settled into reasonably secure housing, stable employment and long-term desistance from substance abuse.

Typically, treatment programs include some combination of pharmaceutical, twelve-step and psychotherapeutic components. Most of the women I have come to know are prescribed mind-boggling assortments of psychotropic medication, some of which make them, as Elizabeth (a white woman in her early forties, Elizabeth was homeless for a decade) used to say, into “a space shot” who shuffles around in a daze that puts her at elevated risk for being robbed or assaulted. Whether anti-anxiety, anti-depression or anti-psychotic drugs, these medications are not intended to cure the underlying problems such as sexual assault and homelessness that lead to anxiety, depression and substance abuse. Rather, psychotropic medications are prescribed in order to manage the individual’sresponse those problems.

While not all treatment programs prescribe psychotropic medication, virtually all incorporate – explicitly or implicitly — twelve step ideology and practices. Treatment facilities tend to be plastered with twelve step slogans such as “Let Go and Let God” and “Cultivate an attitude of gratitude,” and formal AA/NA meetings typically are part of the treatment regime. With emphasis on admitting one’s powerlessness (Step 1) and making moral inventories of one’s faults (Step 4), these programs do not seem to offer the women I have come to know a meaningful script for re-organizing their lives. When I visited Joy, who has been homeless for nearly fifteen years and nearly died as a consequence of a brutal sexual assault, several weeks into her stay in a treatment facility she enthusiastically explained to me that, “I’m learning that my problems are in my head.” Unfortunately, her problems also were in the real world: Less than a year later she was back on the streets where she was sexually accosted by a police officer who then arrested her for solicitation.

Most treatment programs in Massachusetts also include some sort of psychotherapy, and nearly all of the women I know have been treated by multiple therapists over the years, sometimes beginning in adolescence or even childhood. With its focus on the individual psyche, psychotherapy addresses personal flaws such as poor impulse control, allowing oneself to be a victim, and struggles to “get over” past traumas. But as Elizabeth explains, “I don’t need to talk about my problems. I need a place to live so that I won’t be scared all of the time.” This does not mean that therapy is useless; it does mean that “talk is cheap” without the material conditions that permit women like Elizabeth and Joy to build a secure life.

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There is little evidence pointing to long-term success for any particular drug treatment modality. Studies showing positive outcomes typically fail to track program participants for long enough time to establish meaningful rates of success, look only at participants who completed the program, fail to control for confounding variables, or look at very small numbers of participants from the start. The absence of evidence for the success of treatment programs is especially glaring when the treatment is coerced or carried out in a coercive situation. It may be tempting to believe that even if treatment doesn’t help everyone, at least it doesn’t hurt. Yet, as we’ve learned from the past — from efforts to “cure” homosexuality to the tranquilizers (“mother’s little helper“) of the 1960s, when a patient’s ideas or behaviors challenge social hierarchies of race, gender, sexual orientation or class, treatment that is ostensibly for the patient’s own good may be used to bring the “deviant” individual back into line. As those of us old enough to remember Jack Nicholson’s performance in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest can attest, therapeutic interventions aimed at “getting inside” the patient’s head can carry heavy costs indeed.

The murky line between punishment and treatment has not been lost on some of the corporations involved in the prison industry. Correctional Healthcare Companies, for example, has expanded beyond providing medical services to prisons and now offers services for the “full spectrum” of “offenders” lives: “pre-custody, in custody, and post-custody,” a timeline that perhaps says more than the company intended about American understandings of criminality.

As the word “reform” swirls around current conversations about the criminal legal system, many proposed ideas involve new technologies. The techier, the assumption goes, the better! Data-driven “predictive policing” is branded as a route to figuring out where crime is going to happen. (In reality, such tactics involve using previous arrest data to increasingly target neighborhoods of color.) “Risk assessment tools” are sold as key to determining who can safely be paroled – but depending on how they’re used, they may deepen the racist disparities they supposedly counter. Electronic monitoring is advertised as a path toward reducing incarceration, but monitors are actually enlarging the bounds of who is caught inside the carceral system.

All the while, these technological “solutions” are padding the pockets of private companies – at the expense of people of color and the poor.

Video visitation is one such shiny-yet-insidious technology, which has rapidly spread over the past couple of years: More than 500 jails and prisons around the country are now experimenting with it. On the one hand, for people incarcerated far away from their loved ones, video visits could be a welcome channel of communication, allowing them to “meet” face-to-face without requiring long, expensive journeys. The “visits” also offer young children, the elderly and people with disabilities – who might be less able to travel – the opportunity for some face time.

Still, a video visit is no real substitute for an in-person visit, in any universe. However, as a recent report by Prison Policy Initiative documents, the introduction of video visitation often forcibly replaces in-person visits, in order to maximize profits for the private companies that provide the technology. Family and friends, most of whom don’t have much money, are then compelled to pay for the (heftily priced) video calls if they want to see their loved ones’ faces. Add to this the fact that many poor families don’t have access to the equipment necessary to receive a video call – and so, for some, video visitation simply spells the end of visits.

Prison Policy Initiative has produced a series of videos illustrating the deep flaws and dangers that come along with video visitation. These videos are both enlightening and entertaining, and we are happy to debut them here on Truthout.

Watch them below, laugh a little (seriously, they are funny) and decide for yourself: Is video visitation a benefit for families of the incarcerated? Or does it simply deal another blow to marginalized people, while boosting corporate profits?

“Talk to the Forehead”

Video visits often eschew eye-to-eye contact for, well, “eye-to-forehead contact.” Unless you believe that “the eyebrows are the window to the soul,” you might wonder whether bolted-in screens and seating – which limit camera placement and might not even allow your loved one to see your face – make a whole lot of sense. Research shows that especially for young children, eye contact is crucial to making a meaningful connection, and video visits may prove so frustrating that they defeat the point of a call in the first place.

“Options of One”

Is video visitation just like Skype? Nah . . . Most devices (phones, tablets, Macs) aren’t compatible with the video visitation software used in jails and prisons, so unless you’re on a Windows PC, your options are nil. Even if you manage to land the correct computer, depending on bandwidth and specifics, your picture might be out of focus, slow or staticky, and many “visitors” experience pixilated and even frozen images of their loved ones.

“Only $29.95″

In case you had any doubts about video visitation not living up to Skype-like standards, consider this: Although a Skype call is free between two video users, a video visit can cost up to $1.50 per minute. The exorbitant cost of prison phone calls has gotten some much-needed attention lately – and the pricing on video visitation is even more ludicrous (and, for many families, prohibitive). Companies like Securus, JPay, HomeWAV, TurnKey Corrections and Telmate are making bank off of some of the poorest families in the country.

“Family Time?”

Many video visitation contracts ban in-person visits. This is an act of stark cruelty and inhumanity leveled against incarcerated people and their loved ones – but the elimination of face-to-face visits ensures big profits for private companies.

Thankfully, there’s a bit of hope in sight, on this front: Some counties are rejecting the shift toward video visits. (Dallas County, for example, said no to videoconferencing several months ago after a major push by activists.) Still, across the country, contracts for video visitation are barreling forward, endangering the possibility of actual human contact for many thousands of families.

]]>http://prisonbooks.info/2015/02/19/jail-video-visits-are-no-substitute-for-the-real-thing/feed/0prisonbookscollectiveA video visit does not replace an in-person visit, in any universe. Prison Architecture and the Question of Ethicshttp://prisonbooks.info/2015/02/17/prison-architecture-and-the-question-of-ethics/
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A death-row jail cell in Huntsville, Tex. The design of such quarters has raised questions.

SAN FRANCISCO — Faced with lawsuits and a growing mountain of damning research, New York City officials decided last month to ban solitary confinement for prison inmates 21 and younger. Just a few weeks earlier, the American Institute of Architects rejected a petition to censure members who design solitary-confinement cells and death chambers.

“It’s just not something we want to determine as a collective,” Helene Combs Dreiling, the institute’s former president, told me. She said she put together a special panel that reviewed the plea. “Members with deeply embedded beliefs will avoid designing those building types and leave it to their colleagues,” Ms. Dreiling elaborated. “Architects self-select, depending on where they feel they can contribute best.”

What are the ethical boundaries for architecture? Architecture is one of the learned professions, like medicine or law. It requires a license, giving architects a monopoly over their practices, in return for a minimal promise that buildings won’t fall down. Raphael Sperry, the Bay Area architect who spearheaded the petition to the institute, thinks the public deserves more in return for that monopoly.

A gurney in a prison death chamber in Huntsville, Tex.

I met with him here the other morning to talk about the institute’s decision. He said architects have a basic responsibility to act in the public interest, pointing to the institute’s code of ethics and professional conduct, which states, “Members should uphold human rights in all their professional endeavors.” That’s boilerplate, without teeth.

He and I puzzled over solitary confinement, which takes many forms, and whose ethics have a lot to do with enforcement, not just design. Death chambers, by contrast, are custom-built for one purpose. Mr. Sperry’s point was that a rule against them would merely reiterate the association’s standard about human rights.

But the A.I.A. said no, it doesn’t regulate building types. It also said the rule would be hard to enforce.

That sounded like double talk. So I called Ms. Dreiling. “The code has to do with the way architects practice, treat each other, perform in the eyes of our clients,” she told me. “It isn’t about what architects build.”

I asked if the institute has issued any position or policy statement about death chambers.

“No,” she said. “If we begin to stipulate the types of projects our members can and cannot do, it opens a can of worms.”

I imagined that she was talking about other politically fraught buildings, like, say, nuclear power plants or abortion clinics. Mr. Sperry said there was a difference with death chambers. International human-rights treaties don’t explicitly prohibit abortion or nuclear power, as they do execution and torture. The United Nations and other international human-rights organizations consider the death penalty a violation of human rights.

“Is there nothing so odious that the A.I.A. wouldn’t step in?” he asked. “What about concentration camps? The A.I.A. is basically saying business is more important than human rights. Yes, this is a tough profession. But you don’t gain respect by hunkering down in a position of fear. You just dig yourself deeper into a hole.”

If architects want more respect, he argued, they need to take a stand. This is an interesting moment, with echoes in the past. A century ago, movements like the Bauhaus, looking to improve design for the masses, emerged from a culture in which the widening gulf between rich and poor was sundering civil society.

Today, prison design is a civic cause for some architects who specialize in criminal justice and care about humane design. There is a lot of research documenting how the right kinds of design reduce violence inside prisons and even recidivism. Architects can help ensure that prisons don’t succumb to our worst instincts — that they are not about spending the least amount of money to create the most horrendous places possible, in the name of vengeance — but promote rehabilitation and peace.

Designing execution chambers is something else. They require their own deathly architecture. If architects refuse to design them, that doesn’t mean that they won’t be built, any more than the refusal by doctors and pharmaceutical companies to participate in executions has stopped executions from happening. But Ms. Dreiling said it herself: “Many, if not most, architects enter this profession because it is a calling. They believe they can make the world a better place, they believe they can enhance the lives of people on a daily basis, where they live, work and play.”

So is it really too much to ask that the organization representing architects take a stand against projects whose sole purpose is to do the reverse?

In the South Carolina prison system, accessing Facebook is an offense on par with murder, rape, rioting, escape and hostage-taking.

Back in 2012, the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC) made “Creating and/or Assisting With A Social Networking Site” a Level 1 offense [PDF], a category reserved for the most violent violations of prison conduct policies. It’s one of the most common Level 1 offense charges brought against inmates, many of whom, like most social network users, want to remain in contact with friends and family in the outside world and keep up on current events. Some inmates ask their families to access their online accounts for them, while many access the Internet themselves through a contraband cell phone (possession of which is yet another Level 1 offense).

Through a request under South Carolina’s Freedom of Information Act, EFF found that, over the last three years, prison officials have brought more than 400 disciplinary cases for “social networking”—almost always for using Facebook. The offenses come with heavy penalties, such as years in solitary confinement and deprivation of virtually all privileges, including visitation and telephone access. In 16 cases, inmates were sentenced to more than a decade in what’s called disciplinary detention, with at least one inmate receiving more than 37 years in isolation.

The sentences are so long because SCDC issues a separate Level 1 violation for each day that an inmate accesses a social network. An inmate who posts five status updates over five days, would receive five separate Level 1 violations, while an inmate who posted 100 updates in one day would receive only one.

In other words, if a South Carolina inmate caused a riot, took three hostages, murdered them, stole their clothes, and then escaped, he could still wind up with fewer Level 1 offenses than an inmate who updated Facebook every day for two weeks.

So extreme is the application of this policy that SCDC is forced to regularly suspend solitary confinement sentences because of a lack of space in disciplinary segregation. In many cases, the punishments associated with using social media are so unnecessarily long that inmates will never actually serve them since they exceed their underlying prison sentences.

Prison systems have a legitimate interest in keeping contraband devices out of their facilities and preventing inmates from engaging in illegal activities through the Internet. But South Carolina’s policy goes too far, and not only because of the shockingly disproportionate punishments. The policy is also incredibly broad; it can be applied to any reason an inmate may ask someone outside to access the Internet for them, such as having a family member manage their online financial affairs, working with activists to organize an online legal defense campaign, sending letters to online news sites, or just staying in touch with family and friends to create the type of community support crucial to reintegrating into society.

There is also a censorship component.

Facebook has processed hundreds of requests from SCDC officers who want inmates’ profiles taken down. Facebook’s stated policy is to suspend these pages under the auspices of Terms of Service (ToS) violations—specifically, purported violations of terms banning users from using aliases or sharing passwords with third parties—effectively allowing SCDC to censor inmates’ online speech. Yet, as described below, Facebook goes beyond its stated policy and agrees to SCDC requests to censor inmate pages even when no ToS violation has been alleged. In addition, Facebook seems to have taken no action against SCDC investigators who regularly violate these same terms in uncovering inmate profiles.

What’s more, this process is veiled in secrecy, with both Facebook and SCDC failing to create a public record paper trail documenting the takedown of inmate pages.

It’s time for South Carolinians to demand a review of this policy and for Facebook to reevaluate its role in helping prison systems censor and excessively punish inmates.

Social Media in South Carolina Lockups

Prisons and jails across the country have been looking for new ways to keep inmates off the Internet, not only by investing in controversial new cell-tracking technologies such as Stingrays and DRTboxes, but also using social networks as avenue to find and punish inmates.

South Carolina adopted a Level 1 social media offense [PDF] to punish “Creating and/or Assisting With A Social Networking Site,” defined as: “The facilitation, conspiracy, aiding, abetting in the creation or updating of an Internet web site or social networking site.”

SCDC defines “social networking” very broadly, covering everything from YouTube and Twitter to blogs and email, although all of the cases EFF reviewed [PDF] involved Facebook. Investigations are conducted by corrections officers and inmates are convicted during disciplinary hearings that often last mere minutes.

Since the policy was implemented, SCDC has brought 432 disciplinary cases against 397 inmates, with more than 40 inmates receiving more than two years in solitary confinement [PDF].

Here are some of the most severe social media punishments we’ve seen:

In October 2013, Tyheem Henry received 13,680 days (37.5 years) in disciplinary detention and lost 27,360 day (74 years) worth of telephone, visitation, and canteen privileges, and 69 days of good time—all for 38 posts on Facebook.

In June 2014, Walter Brown received 12,600 days (34.5 years) in disciplinary detention and lost 25,200 days (69 years) in telephone, visitation, and canteen privileges, and 875 days (2.4 years) of good time—all for 35 posts on Facebook.

In May 2014, Jonathan McClain received 9,000 days (24.6 years) in disciplinary detention and lost 18,000 days (49 years) in telephone, visitation, and canteen privileges, and 30 days of good time—all for 25 posts on Facebook.

The average punishment length for a “social networking” case was 512 days in disciplinary detention, and the average length of lost privileges was even longer.

So disproportionate are these punishments that South Carolina doesn’t have space in disciplinary detention for all the offenders and “regularly” is forced to put the punishments on hold. In the cases of the three above inmates, SCDC says that none will serve the full punishment since they will be released from prison within the next five to 10 years.

As punishment for social media use, inmates also lose “good time” days that would had otherwise resulted in early release. Since 2012, inmates have collectively lost 14,564 “good time” days, the equivalent of 44 extra years in prison. In fiscal terms, that’s approximately $842,000 [PDF] more that taxpayers will have to pay to keep inmates behind bars—just because they posted on Facebook.

In summer 2014, SCDC launched a mechanism for crowdsourcing social media investigations with a prominent button on the front page of its website, encouraging the public to report inmates using social media to SCDC. In only eight months, SCDC has collected more 230 submissions from the public about inmates using social networks and cell phones.

SCDC also uses outside contractors in its investigations, paying $12,500 to an unnamed entity for unspecified services. All but the price tag was redacted from the document [PDF] provided to EFF under South Carolina’s Freedom of Information Act.

Certain other tactics are more alarming. In response to inquiries from EFF [PDF], SCDC acknowledged that staff obtained inmate passwords through various means, including from inmates informing on inmates, family members, and the inmates themselves. In violation of Facebook’s Terms of Service, SCDC staff have used those passwords to access inmate accounts.

SCDC investigators have also created fake social media profiles in order to catch inmates in the act—again, a clear violation of Facebook’s Terms of Service. Unfortunately, all information regarding these investigations is shielded from disclosure under the state’s Freedom of Information Act.

In addition to the potential legal issues these practices may raise, the policies also pose problems for Facebook, which, as of February 3, has processed 512 “deactivation requests” from South Carolina corrections officers since 2012.

Facebook: Prison Censor

Facebook has made it all too easy for prisons to report inmates for having profiles: the site has a form titled “Inmate Account Takedown Request.” A corrections officer only needs to enter a few pieces of information about the inmate—the inmate’s name, profile link, and the crime for which they’re being imprisoned, but not the purported violation of Facebook’s Terms of Service—to get the inmate’s profile taken down.

In direct discussions with EFF, Facebook repeatedly asserted it does not enforce prison policies. Rather, according to Facebook, when a corrections officer contacts Facebook about an inmate page, Facebook staff may suspend the account on the grounds that the inmate violated the site’s Terms of Service.

Specifically, Facebook pointed to terms that forbid users from sharing their passwords or otherwise allowing other people to access their accounts, a practice common among inmates. Facebook claims that they suspend inmate accounts for violations of this policy not only because of the ToS violation, but also because it protects the inmate’s privacy. Facebook also forbids the use of aliases, which inmates also frequently employ.

However, prisons are very aware of how to exploit Facebook’s Terms of Service, with the Federal Bureau of Prisons even quoting the terms in handbooks [PDF] and presentations [PDF], adding that “Facebook also deactivates prisoner pages, regardless of who set up the page.”

Facebook says this isn’t true, but its claim that it does not enforce prison policies is contradicted by correspondence that shows Facebook explicitly censored a South Carolina inmate’s page when no ToS violation was alleged.

In July 2014, a South Carolina corrections officer emailed Facebook asking for the removal of the profile of an inmate who had violated prison policy by accessing Facebook through a cell phone. Accessing Facebook through a contraband cell phone in itself does not seem to be a ToS violation. But as the below email shows, Facebook still removed the page—not for a ToS violation, but for breach of “inmate regulations.”

Remarkably, this email exchange occurred after Facebook assured EFF it was not doing this exact thing.

This was the only email chain [PDF] between Facebook and SCDC that EFF received in response to the FOIA request. That’s because Facebook’s system allows for secret censorship. Inmate takedown requests usually occur through Facebook’s online form, which, as a Facebook employee told SCDC in a follow-up email, does not generate a receipt email. This means that more than 500 inmate take down requests have been filed without any kind of paper trail accessible to the inmate or the public—a lack of transparency that is simply not acceptable when government-instigated censorship is involved.

Even if you take Facebook at its word—i.e., that it only enforces its own Terms of Service (despite the evidence to the contrary)—Facebook is guilty of applying a double standard when it comes to ToS violations. SCDC’s practices of logging into inmate’s accounts and creating fake profiles is a clear violation of not only its ToS, but also the very same terms inmates are accused of violating. Despite SCDC’s rule-breaking, Facebook allows SCDC to maintain its own public Facebook page, where it posts career fair notices and positive news stories about its programs.

When EFF pointed this out, Facebook said it would remove any of SCDC’s secret alias pages we could identify—but this is a next to impossible feat given that information about such secret aliases isn’t publicly available through South Carolina’s FOIA.

Ensuring Accountability

South Carolina may be unique only in the frequency and severity with which it enforces social media punishments. In New Mexico, an inmate was sentenced to 60 days in solitary confinement after his family members accessed Facebook on his behalf. In Alabama, a law was recently passed to make it a misdemeanor to serve as a go-between for an inmate who wants to post information to the Internet.

These policies have not gone unchallenged. An Arizona law forbidding inmates from accessing the Internet through a third party was struck down as unconstitutional. The Florida Department of Corrections backtracked on a policy proposal similar to South Carolina’s after the Florida Justice Institute and other civil liberties groups threatened litigation [PDF]. Just last week, the ACLU of Indiana filed a lawsuit alleging First Amendment violations when prison officials punished an inmate after his sister launched a social media campaign to get him freed.

SCDC has set up a system that allows prison administrators to hold inmates longer, in harsher conditions, and to largely cut them off from the rest of the world. South Carolinians should demand an immediate review of how this policy is applied.

We’re also calling on Facebook to embrace the position that inmate communication often has public value, such as when inmates raise issues about possibly unconstitutional prison conditions and other irregularities in the criminal justice system.

Steps Facebook should take include:

Stop censoring inmates without first evaluating whether a serious ToS violation has occurred (such as harassing a victim or engaging in a criminal enterprise).

Eliminate the inmate takedown feature, or, at the very least, ensure that a public record (such as a receipt email) is generated every time a prison official files a takedown request and every time Facebook complies.

Revise its transparency report to include detailed numbers of takedown requests Facebook has received, what agency sent each request, and how Facebook responded.

Hold law enforcement agencies, such as prisons, accountable for abusing Facebook’s ToS.

Balancing the rights of inmates with public safety is a tricky task, but prisons—and the companies that assist them—must consider proportionality and fairness for justice to be truly served.